Abstract
Nowadays, coffee, cocoa, and spices have broad applications in the food and pharmaceutical industries due to their organoleptic and nutraceutical properties, which have turned them into products of great commercial demand. Consequently, these products are susceptible to fraud and adulteration, especially those sold at high prices, such as saffron, vanilla, and turmeric. This situation represents a major problem for industries and consumers’ health. Implementing analytical techniques, i.e., Fourier transform mid-infrared (FT-MIR) spectroscopy coupled with multivariate analysis, can ensure the authenticity and quality of these products since these provide unique information on food matrices. The present review addresses FT-MIR spectroscopy and multivariate analysis application on coffee, cocoa, and spices authentication and quality control, revealing their potential use and elucidating areas of opportunity for future research.
Highlights
Spices in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia were used as medicine, currency, and food preservatives
Conventional methods for authentication and quality control range from simple techniques such as Kjeldahl, Soxhlet, and UV/vis to more specialized ones such as highperformance liquid chromatography (HPLC), gas chromatography (GC), capillary electrophoresis (CE), mass spectrometry (MS), X-ray fluorescence (XRF), inductively coupled plasma (ICP), proton transfer reaction (PTR), matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionizationtime-of-flight (MALDI-TOF), and DNA analysis, among others
The authors examined the spectra of unadulterated samples obtained from each spectroscopic technique by classifying them with principal component analysis (PCA) according to their origin; they obtained a better prediction with NIR spectra
Summary
Spices in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia were used as medicine, currency, and food preservatives. Conventional methods for authentication and quality control range from simple techniques such as Kjeldahl, Soxhlet, and UV/vis to more specialized ones such as highperformance liquid chromatography (HPLC), gas chromatography (GC), capillary electrophoresis (CE), mass spectrometry (MS), X-ray fluorescence (XRF), inductively coupled plasma (ICP), proton transfer reaction (PTR), matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionizationtime-of-flight (MALDI-TOF), and DNA analysis, among others All these require prior sample preparation and detailed knowledge; besides, the procedure is slow, destructive, expensive, pollutant, and hazardous for the analyst [12,20,22]. Mid-infrared (MIR) and near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy are widely used in food quality control because spectra analysis in the fingerprint region provides unique information to differentiate compounds, even if two molecules have the same functional groups [26,27,28,29]. We conducted a review of the literature on FT-MIR spectroscopy combined with multivariate analysis methods for authentication and quality control of coffee, cocoa, saffron, turmeric, vanilla, and other spices. MIR spectra of solid foods, liquids, powders, pastes, and viscous fluids can be obtained through ATR-FT-MIR spectroscopy [45,50] using diverse crystal materials (typically made of ZnSe, ZnS, Ge, Si, or diamond) according to sample type [27]
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